Gerrit Smith - Early Life

Early Life

Smith was born in Utica, Oneida County, New York, to Peter Gerrit Smith (1768–1837) and Elizabeth (Livingston) Smith (1773–1818), daughter of Col. James Livingston (1747–1832) and Elizabeth (Simpson) Livingston (1750–1800).

Smith's maternal aunt, Margaret Livingston, was married to Judge Daniel Cady (1773–1859). Their daughter Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a founder and leader of the women's suffrage movement, was Smith's first cousin. Elizabeth Cady met her future husband, Henry Stanton, also an active abolitionist, at the Smith family home in Peterboro, New York. Established in 1795, the town had been founded by and named for Gerrit Smith's father, Peter Smith, who built the family homestead there in 1804.

Gerrit Smith graduated from Hamilton College in 1818. In January 1819, he married Wealtha Ann Backus (1800–1819), daughter of Hamilton College's first President, Azel Backus D.D. (1765–1817) and sister of Frederick F. Backus (1794–1858), but Wealtha died in August of the same year. Returning home from college, Smith took on the management of the vast estate of his father, a long-standing partner of John Jacob Astor, and greatly increased the family fortune. In 1822, he married Ann Carroll Fitzhugh (1805–1879), sister of Henry Fitzhugh (1801–1866). They had two children: Elizabeth Smith (1822–1911) and Greene Smith (ca. 1841–1880).

About 1828 Smith became an active temperance campaigner, and in his hometown of Peterboro, he built one of the first temperance hotels in the country. He became an abolitionist in 1835, after attending an anti-slavery meeting in Utica, which had been broken up by a mob.